Stefano is a successful fifty-years-old, but disappointed and unmotivated. He works as editorial director for a publishing house and lives in the beautiful world of city fiction and intelligentsia, literary awards, cultured parties. He has a young but painstaking lover, Silvia, to whom he published her first novel. He has an older confidant, Renata, manager of the publishing house, and few friends working with him, Mara and Paolo. He is divorced from his wife, Sara, a wealthy woman who still allowed him to live in her family home, a messy house, left to go, full of books and manuscripts.